


Tigress

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Aftermath of a Case, Community: watsons_woes, Gen, POV Female Character, Story: A Case of Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-12-05 19:08:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11584320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: Tell the truth and shame the Devil. Takes place after the ACD Canon story “A Case of Identity.”





	Tigress

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2017 July Watson's Woes Promptfest prompt #22, **I Came Here to Talk About the Red-Headed League and I’m Honestly Feeling So Attacked Right Now.** Examine Holmes and/or Watson from the POV of one of their clients.
> 
> This is my absolute unabashed fix-it for the misogynistic ending of Doyle's "A Case of Identity."

Mr. Holmes bid me go on with my life and forget my vanished beau; that I would never do, for I am no girl to turn jilt at the first adversity. My fiancé Hosmer Angel had bid me be faithful to him though he be gone a dozen years, and that I would do.

Dr. Watson, however, sent a telegram less than a week after my final visit to Baker Street. In it he urged that I meet him in a public place to discuss the actual fate of Hosmer – that certain details had come to light that had not been revealed to me. Stunned and apprehensive, I nonetheless acceded and sent a reply agreeing to such a meeting. We chose a public park in the early afternoon of the next day.

Dr. Watson waited for me on a park bench at a public walkway; I recognised the trim moustache of the quiet man who had jotted down notes for Mr. Holmes nearly as fast as I could type whilst I had told him the whole story of my courtship with Mr. Hosmer Angel. There was such a grim air about him that my heart dropped into my boots. Surely my poor Hosmer is dead, or his ship is lost at sea, thought I, and I needs must be the grieving widow without even the benefit of marriage to sanctify my grief.

“Miss Sutherland,” Dr. Watson began with no niceties at all once I had seated myself. “My friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes has many excellent qualities of observation and deduction, but on one particular subject he is as blind and nearly stupid as any man can be – he knows nothing of the strength of women. I will say only in his defence that his deceit was intended solely to spare you the pain I am about to inflict upon you.”

“You are about to tell me that my Hosmer is dead.” I said it quite steadily, I think.

“I wish it were as kind or as easy an announcement,” was his quiet, terrifying reply. “But it is worse. It is far worse. I know you will be very angry with me for saying it, and will likely not believe it at first. I only ask you, when your anger has ebbed, to use the same logical method of deduction that Mr. Sherlock Holmes uses, once I have told you the truth – for however long it takes for you to see that it is the truth.”

I shook my head, dread and bewilderment mixing within me. “What are you talking about? If Hosmer is deathly ill, or being held captive and tormented somewhere by brutes, how could I be angry at you telling me?”

“Mr. Hosmer Angel, your intended,” said Dr. Watson bluntly, “and Mr. James Windibank, your stepfather, are one and the same man.”

Here I burst out laughing, in relief as much as for the ridiculousness of his absurd prank to lure me out with such news.

He only looked at me with no surprise on his face at my reaction. “I wish I were joking, Miss Sutherland,” he continued soberly as if reading my mind, “for the truth is a cruel and despicable deed that the law cannot even touch. Your stepfather impersonated a man to catch your eye at the gasfitter’s dance, capture your heart, forbid you to leave your household for another love, and then desert you at the altar, for the sole, greedy purpose of preventing you from taking your inheritance away from his use while you live there. James Windibank broke his stepdaughter’s heart for the sake of a miserable 100 pounds a year.”

What a ridiculous fairy tale!

And yet…and yet as Dr. Watson kept speaking – referring to notes he’d made of my own discussion of the matter – and showed how Mr. Holmes had put everything together, however improbable… my own mind began unwillingly to follow in the detective’s footsteps. Now I saw how it looked that I’d never seen Hosmer and my father in the same place; I’d never seen Hosmer without his tinted shades and soft rasping voice; that his most noteworthy facial feature were his enormous sideburns and that I could not swear to recognise his face if they were to be removed; his insistence that I never court or wed another man just before he disappeared, which I’d taken as a terrible foreboding on his part; the typewritten letters all shewing the same eccentric ‘e’s and ‘r’s as the ones from my stepfather’s machine –

It was here that I slapped Dr. Watson's face. He did not even look surprised.

I am a typist by trade, and know very well by my own experience that each machine has its own peculiarity that is rarely the same on any other typewriter, and what a very odd coincidence that Hosmer and father should own a machine with exactly the same peculiarities – and that was when I believed Dr. Watson, and realised what my stepfather had done to me, and that was why I struck him. For the only outlet for my terrible rush of pain and humiliation at the way I’d been used was a man who had hurt me only to save me from a terrible delusion.

I’m afraid I made rather a scene in that public park. I jumped to my feet and cried all sorts of foul accusations at the man; I must have provided amusement for the children trailing their nurses and shocked the dowagers out for their stroll, seeing what must have looked like a courting couple having a distasteful public breakup.

I would not have blamed Dr. Watson if he’d gotten up and left, having weathered a blow and terrible accusations in public by a woman so stupid as to be gulled by her own stepfather into a courtship straight out of a French farce. I will never forget Dr. Watson's face throughout; he showed no anger or outrage at my physical and verbal assault, only the same grim sadness.

I wanted to run away, I felt as if my shame were written all over me for everyone to see – stupid old maid, duped by a confidence man – and all that stopped me (aside from the not inconsiderable detail that I had nowhere to go, save back to a house owned by the monster who had done this to me) was the doctor reaching into his sleeve and pulling out a handkerchief, proffering it to me in mid-hysteria. That act of kindness from a man I’d been berating was the last straw on the camel’s back; I collapsed onto the bench instead, and buried my face in it, and thought my heart would break in two.

I don’t know how long we sat there together; certainly long enough for a brand-new set of governesses and old women to see a very different drama on their walk (now a tragedy rather than a romantic comedy). When I could speak again it was only the most clichéd of cries from a wronged woman: “What am I to do? Oh, what am I to _do_?”

“The first thing you must do is to cry at the foul injustice that has been perpetrated upon you,” he said, “and that you are doing admirably just now, Miss Sutherland.” I laughed a little into the kerchief between my sobs. “Mr. Holmes himself said that he wished you had a male relative who could lay a horsewhip across Mr. Windibank’s shoulders for his deceit, and indeed came very close to striking the man for your sake.”

“Then he knows,” I hiccupped. “F – _Stepfather_.” I made that word sound as much like a curse as I could.

“He does not know that you know,” Dr. Watson said.

“He’ll – he’ll – s-s-see my f-face and n-know.” I felt as if I wore a dunce cap for the whole park to see. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

“He’ll know you’ve been crying. Perhaps, if you can tolerate being in the same house as that man for a few more days, you can convince him that you are grieving your missing intended.”

Something in the tone of Dr. Watson's voice sounded like a man thinking of a plan. I raised my head and looked him in the eye. I’d been horrid to him; I’d be as big a coward as my stepfather if I did not face Dr. Watson now.

He pulled something else out, this time from his notebook – a folded sheet of paper, with an address written upon it. “Our landlady Mrs. Hudson has provided a reference for a clean and respectable boarding-house for unmarried women, that will be easily affordable to someone in possession of £100 a year and who also makes a decent salary of her own.”

I took the paper and stared at it. It felt as if something inside me were dying. To leave my family home –

“I am a doctor, Miss Sutherland,” Dr. Watson continued in the same steady voice. There was no pity or disgust in his tone, only anger for me. “Sometimes, when a limb is too diseased to be salvaged, it must be amputated. And for a man as vile as your stepfather who has already cowed your mother so much that she did not defend you from this monstrous deception, the surest and most painful way to get your vengeance is to remove the only thing he truly loves about you – your money.”

I didn’t say anything. But I know that I nodded.

***

That is what I did, after that dreadful day at the park. I kept my face veiled to hide both my tears and my unguarded expressions – let stepfather be gulled by costume for a change! – and permitted him to think I was still his stupid gold-egg-laying goose, mourning a fictitious man, while I gathered the few belongings I needed as well as my typewriter and what money I had at hand. And one day the following week I left the house and did not return. The notes I left for both mother and stepfather did not have a forwarding address, and ended by saying that they were free to contact Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson to discuss the reasons that had led to my leaving, should they wish to cause legal trouble – and Mr. Holmes especially had unfinished business with stepfather that he was very eager to pursue. As I suspected, I did not hear back from them.

For my first few weeks at Mrs. Turner’s I did little but cry and mope in my room (rather to the alarm of Sallie my room-mate); but I was eventually able to dry my eyes and return to my work at the typewriter. Ironically, I wound up keeping the promise I’d made to what I’d thought had been Hosmer Angel – I’d been so repulsed at what a man had done to me only for money that I vowed never to deal romantically with the sex ever again.

Gradually, another thing Dr. Watson had told me that afternoon came to my mind: “Write your pain out, Miss Sutherland. I can attest to the good that it does, whether by pen or by typewriter.” So in addition to the typewriting that earned my board and keep (alongside the £100 that now began to quietly build, a quarter-year at a time, in its own bank account under my name and not my stepfather’s), I began to write. At first I merely recounted the deceit that had happened to me. But my own love for romance and whimsy changed everything, and I resolved to make the whole thing a silly adventure, a rollicking bit of nonsense, where only bad people got hurt by deception.

So I told a story that took place long ago, during the Reign of Terror in France. I told of a man who deceived his simple wife not because he was a cad but because he was a hero – a disguised modern Robin Hood who rescued innocents from the guillotine. And in the villain I flung every bit of my rage at my stepfather into his description and his unctuous words and wicked deeds. I even changed my own name – not only in the story but in pseudonym form as the authoress.

Dr. Watson's agent says that he will be happy to publish the book (and I am quite the celebrity among the other women of the boarding-house now), and wishes only that I change the title from _The Shepherd’s Clock_. Fortunately that flower has several names, so once I have chosen between Scarlet Pimpernel or Red Chickweed the business is done.


End file.
